Posted
by
CmdrTacoon Monday April 21, 2008 @11:00AM
from the spinning-really-fast dept.

MojoKid was one of a number of people to submit about WDs new 10k RPM SATA Drive. He says "Western Digital's Raptor line of Hard Drives has been very popular with
performance enthusiasts, as a desktop drive with enterprise-class performance.
Today WD has launched a new line of
high-performance desktop drives dubbed the VelociRaptor, and the product
finally scales in capacity as well. The new SATA-based VelociRaptor weighs in at
300GB with the same 10K RPM spindle speed, but with one other major
difference — it's based on 2.5" technology. Its smaller two-platter, four-head
design affords the VelociRaptor random access and data transfer rates
significantly faster than competing desktop SATA offerings. Areal density per
platter has increased significantly as well, which contributes to
solid performance gains versus the legacy WD Raptor series."

Interesting to see that 2.5" form factor disks are now faster than their desktop-size cousins. In a way it's a shame that WD decided to bulk out the case with extra heatsinks... it would have been more fun for them to ship a properly sized 2.5" drive you could put in your laptop.

The review only compares the new drive to older models from the same manufacturer, and it turns out to be faster - duh. How does the performance compare with those expensive solid state disks that are starting to appear?

Interesting to see that 2.5" form factor disks are now faster than their desktop-size cousins. In a way it's a shame that WD decided to bulk out the case with extra heatsinks... it would have been more fun for them to ship a properly sized 2.5" drive you could put in your laptop.

Yeah it's a shame since I like to watch my hard disks fry. Clearly, you enjoy watching your laptop fry as well.

When spinning up from a cold start, the WD3000BLFS maintains its prowess with a very economical showing on its 12V rail. At just 9 watts, the VelociRaptor weighs in a full 6 watts (66%!) lower than any other drive SR has ever encountered.

I think the heatsink is mostly for show, and to make the drive fit into a normal case. Still, it would be nice if they made it easily removable.

That 9 watt figure is for spinup power which doesn't really contribute to overall heat for the drive considering spinup takes a second or two.

What you want to know is idle and seek power for the VelociRaptor which is 4.2/6.9W. The 3.5" WD GP has an idle power which is lower at 3.8W and a seek power which is higher at 7.6W. What you can see from the charts is that the VelociRaptor is indeed low powered compared to most drives and should only generate marginally more heat than a 3.5 WD GP.

That is an excellent point. For servers in particular, the Raptor's heat density is probably greater than that of a 3.5" drive, which matters if it has lots of drives. For a regular user with 1 or 2 drives though, it's supposed to be a very cool-running drive.

Actually, you can remove the 3.5" container (I believe running it like this voids your warranty) but it still won't fit in a laptop because apparently although 2.5" form factor, it is several mm too high for a laptop. Not that you should attempt to run a 10K drive inside a laptop in the first place, especially without that heatsink thingy.
The performance seems to be equal or better than SSD's.
source: http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/HDD-SATA-VelociRaptor,1914.html [tomshardware.com]

It's NOT a notebook drive. It's a 2.5" server hard drive put into a funky heat sink, presumably so it would work fine in desktop systems where the system designer or the owner might not have considered proper cooling, or to simplify cooling requirements.

It's not the same areal density. It's higher. I think the Raptor X uses like 4-6 platters, and I think this story says they use 2 platters.

As it is, the 2.5" server drives do get faster access times than the closest 3.5" drives of the same RPM, I think in part because the head arm is shorter (less rotational inertia) and doesn't need to swing as far. Higher areal density helps get higher transfer rates.

You can't compare it with an old drive. I just expect them to be able to make similair density in current gen drives no matter what platter size. (may the arm control or something limit it somewhat more on a 3.5" drive)Yeah, I assume access time / round are the same but as you say "swinging distance" are shorter on a 2.5" drive. Only reason I can see why access times would get lower. But beyond that I would assume a 3.5" drive at 10krpm to be able to have similair data density and therefor own this a lot in

In a way it's a shame that WD decided to bulk out the case with extra heatsinks... it would have been more fun for them to ship a properly sized 2.5" drive you could put in your laptop.

Consumer electronics manufacturers often design products to preclude stacking by using a rounded or irregular top because of heat dissipation requirements. It would not surprise me if WD had the same sort of thought for this drive because almost all existing laptops are not designed to handle the power dissipation of 10K RPM

The enterprise version is supposed to use a standard connector, so those who want their laptop disk IO to outperform most desktops, including most RAID0 arrays, may be able to use those.For reliability, I have an old 74GB Raptor that's still working fine, but StorageReview's reliability benchma

According to TFA, the Velociraptor consumes the least power [hothardware.com] out of the drives compared (all WD, including a Raptor 150).

And also being a WD drive, as far as reliability goes you'd probably be better off just keeping your important documents in RAM.

I've had 1 drive out of over 20 fail on me in the last 6 years, all made by WD (including several Raptors, which run hot as hell but never seem to skip a beat). The one WD drive that did fail did so only after 3+ years of constant usage in a server.

I guess I don't understand all the WD bashing. They do have warranties, you know, and I hear they even honor them.

Besides, why are you relying on a single drive? If you have Important Documents you need redundancy + backups, not a "better" hard drive. You should check this [nongnu.org] out. It's saved my butt on more than one occasion.

Probably comes from people who, like me, used a ton of WD200, WD400, WD800, and some others, that had over 90% failure rate in the first 6 months. The only reason the OEM I worked for even used the drives is that they were cheaper (by only a few bucks, but every buck counts in this business!) than the others.

Yes, they did replace them all, but when you count in all the time in rebuilding OS installs, shipping, phone calls to get RMA's, etc, it's just not worth it.

Once we switched to Seagate, we never had to deal with all of that again. Yes, we might have 1 drive go bad once in a blue moon, but no where near what we had with WD.

I had sworn off of WD drives in the mid/late '90's because of similar issues. No matter what, though, I couldn't talk my boss out of using them. He learned to listen to my opinions after that, though...

Now, before I start getting modded down to hell, here; yes, I realize there are people (like you) that seem to have had very good luck with WD's drives. Unfortunately (for WD), your experiences seem to be far and few between.

I guess I don't understand all the WD bashing. They do have warranties, you know, and I hear they even honor them.

Probably comes from people who, like me, used a ton of WD200, WD400, WD800, and some others, that had over 90% failure rate in the first 6 months. The only reason the OEM I worked for even used the drives is that they were cheaper (by only a few bucks, but every buck counts in this business!) than the others.

[...]

Once we switched to Seagate, we never had to deal with all of that again. Yes, we might have 1 drive go bad once in a blue moon, but no where near what we had with WD.

Wow, a 90% failure rate within 6 month surely doesn't leave any drives functioning after more than a couple of years. Well my WD800JB is still just fine after more than five years of almost continuous usage, so obviously you're full of it, right?> I realize there are people (like you) that seem to have had very good luck with WD's drives.

Yeah, and there are also people like you with their unsupported anecdotes, and then there are large scale studies, like that done by google, which say that while some m

I'm not sure who's the one with comprehension problems;). What I'm saying is that if 90% of the drives fail within the first 6 months, the probability of significant numbers of them (depending on sample size and other stuff, which of course you don't actually reveal. See below) lasting more than a couple of years is extremely thin since, at best, they'd be following ~4-8% annualized failure rates as per the Google paper, and possibly much worse because WD drives are obviously so terrible.

Of course, this all depends on how one interpretes your story. Did 10% of your customers experience no failures, while the other 90% all lost their drives within 6 months? Or did all customers lose 90% of their drives? Or was that 10% of 10% of HDDs that survived? Really, between your two posts this is not very clear at all. Never mind though. The whole point of that part of my post was to set up the silly counter example, on which, by the way, you did not call me out. Which brings me to...

The "full of it" part was supposed to illustrate how foolish it is to use limited personal anecdotes (that's what they are, plural of anecdote != data) to make any strong statements, notice that I used my experience with ONE WD drive to counter your argument.

Also, a "ton" is not a suitable quantifier for the sample or population size, unless you're ordering your hard drives by weight. In that case, I'm not surprised that 90% of them fail immediately:D. For the sake of argument though, with a metric "tonne" this works out to about 1666 units at 600 grams per 2-platter hard drive (which is what the WD800 are [westerndigital.com]). This is quite reasonable actually, but still about two orders of magnitude lower than google's.

I was able to find some graphs with HDD failures broken down by manufacturers. The difference between Seagate and WD is a whopping 0.48 percentage points. This might or might not be statistically significant, as no additional information is available. In any case, it's far from impressive. Here's the graph in question. [sunrise.ru] It's based on RMAs from a PC equipment stores, and the whole thing is available here. [sunrise.ru] It's in Russian, but the text doesn't say anything which isn't on the graphs.

I'm not taking this personally at all, and I have no stake in WD whatsoever, only in truth. This probably sounds way too cheesy, but that's what it is. Between the laptops, which mostly came with Hitachi drives, and a bunch of Seagate and Samsung drives in desktops, WD drives probably don't even make up the majority of all HDDs, and that's the only connection I have to WD. Do you work for Seagate, by the way? So far, I'm the only one who tried to use actual numbers and cited any sources (even if you don't like them), so the ball's in your court.

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From another reply:> I'd also like to quote that, as of right now the *only* message below the post you replied to that has been positively moderated is mine. Obviously I'm not alone in my experiences...

Well to be honest, now I'm really impressed. With the power of slashdot moderation statistics potentially on my side, I could finish my thesis in just a few hours! Anybody knows what's the proper MLA citation format for a slashdot moderation?

Even without the cooling, the 2.5" based core is still way too thick/hot for a laptop.At $1/gig it is still way cheaper than solid state drives, but expect those to get cheaper faster.It's frustrating that the power benchmark they're using is measuring the whole computer.You'd think someone doing benchmarks would use a small separate supply for the drive(s) to do the measurement. If the standby consumption and efficiency under load were measured for a small separate supply (easily determined with resistive

The "guts" are mostly similar to a 3.5" desktop drive, although the platters themselves have a 2.5" diameter, reducing the rotational inertia, weight, and surface area of said platters, allowing the drive to spin faster, and with less power.

I've always wondered - what's the noise like on a 10k drive? I would think its safe to assume that they're louder, but with smaller platters, who knows. I'm always working to make my machine quieter, and sometimes this seems to come into conflict with making it faster.

I use a striped pair of 36GB Raptors for my system disk. (Data disk is 3 drive RAID 5) Speed is great, but the little brutes do need active cooling, and are anything but quiet. Maybe it is the pair of them doing synchronous seeks that make them so noisy, who knows? They are the noisiest disks I have used since a pair of 250MB Connors about 15 years ago.
Happy with them? Oh hell yes.
Next computer will have the same setup, but much more noise damping.

i love the orginal 10k drive.s. i have a 36gb IBM 10k SCSI drive.. and man it is like a jet engine.. but sadly it is quite comparied to the 9.1gb 15k SCSI drives i have in one of the rack boxes.. when that box turns off the room is silent.. even though there is the whole of the rack still going..

It's a little better than the current Raptors' [diskcompare.com] 0.88 GB/$, but nowhere close to the 6.25 GB/$ for a Samsung Spinpoint F1 [diskcompare.com]. You gotta wonder if a RAID array of cheaper drives wouldn't give you overall better performance, and more than 2x the storage for way less money.

I always looked at it this way: If you have one really nice/fast drive and it fails, you *still* lose everything you had. I'd rather spend the same (or less) cash on two slightly smaller, slower drives and throw them into an array...

I have always believed that is why RAID0 has been so popular.

You get better performance, bigger drive, and it's only pitfall is that if one drive dies, then they are both pretty toast.

Backups are still a good idea though. Accidental deletion, corrupt filesystem, and all that can still eat your data. Not that I've ever done this...RAID1 also improves performance for reads somewhat compared to a single drive (though for writes, it is slightly slower unfortunately, plus you only get the space of one drive).

I always looked at it this way: If you have one really nice/fast drive and it fails, you *still* lose everything you had. I'd rather spend the same (or less) cash on two slightly smaller, slower drives and throw them into an array...

Yes but the point is that with N drives striped without parity (i.e. RAID 0), you increase your probability of disastrous failure proportionally to N.

Say that 1 expensive drive has a reliability rating of 2u (arbitrary units, where higher is better) and you are advocating using two cheaper drives with a reliability of 1u each, then striping them gives a combined reliability of 1u/2 or.5u... maybe you get performance approaching the 1 expensive disk but at a cost of 75% reliability. Realistically the target market for these drives is deploying them in arrays with parity and spares. I personally don't see any performance increase when going to 2 drives vs

RAID isn't going to give you better performance than this Raptor other than in STR (sustained transfer rate, like copying large files or streaming HD video). STR is about worthless for desktop computers, though RAID0 does improve performance for other things a bit.
Just, not as much as people seem to think when they read a misleading benchmark written by some dope that thinks HDTach and Atto are worth the floppy disks they're installed from. (They are great tools for what they do, just, they are misu

Raid arrays increase access time - from 10-50% depending on the type of array.

However, for streaming data, yes a properly formatted striped array will produce significantly higher throughput. The problem is, for most games/database work, the seek times are actually more important than the throughput. A review of RAID 0 in games showed that while the load time of the game was decreased, there was no significant change to the playability of the game - due to the number of small files loaded during usage - an

For many applications rotational latency still matters, so yes you get more GB/$ but you have worse performance profile for some apps. You also have to consider duty cycle. I believe the Raptors are rated for a more server like duty cycle whereas that drive is probably rated only for a desktop duty cycle.

If you want real performance and aren't afraid of having to do a complete rebuild on a regular basis then the best bet is to purely use a huge amount of RAM, not Flash or other solid state disks but real genuine RAM.

Okay so its insanely expensive and a power cut and UPS failure means you lose everything.... but the SPEED is fantastic.

I mean I'm running Vista Ultimate on a dual quad-core server with 500GB of standard RAM as a disk and I can boot in under a minute and use Outlook AND Word at the same time.

If you want real performance and aren't afraid of having to do a complete rebuild on a regular basis then the best bet is to purely use a huge amount of RAM, not Flash or other solid state disks but real genuine RAM.Okay so its insanely expensive and a power cut and UPS failure means you lose everything.... but the SPEED is fantastic

Talking about speed, this is an effective design. Multiple UPS and a separate computer that maintains the RAM will give reliability. Not sure if it's worth it just to boot faste

Does anyone have any ideas about multiple heads? If the heads are swinging independently, the mechanics are quite complex, but what if the heads all swing in unison - all together at the same direction and speed? Then the heads can spend less time per cylinder. Heads can also be given a positional offset in order to be on different cylinders at the same time. Complex mechanics, but in today's level of technology, par for the course as the saying goes. Even a slower RPM drive can still have the performance o

I've gone through 3 drives now from them for 2 of my 3 laptops. The first one made it 10 months and technically was still under warranty. But because the manufacture date stamp on the drive was more than 12 months, they would not honor my warranty. Yea, I had the receipt but the guy in India was not concerned with that and would only take a credit card number to order another one at full retail price! Screw em'. Drilled a big bad hole through the thing and put in recycle bin.Two other drives didn't even mak

Sounds like you're purchasing your drives from a dodgy OEM, especially since all of their laptop drives ship with 3-year warranty [wdc.com].

I suppose this might have been different in the past, though judging a hard drive manufacturer purely based upon anecdotal evidence is a bit flimsy. There are people who say the same thing about every single other hard drive manufacturer out there.

I'll wholeheartedly agree that there can be bad batches of drives (which is most likely what you encountered), though any faults are usually rectified quickly enough that there doesn't seem to be all that huge of a difference across manufacturers when you look at the entire population.

If you've ever managed a computer lab (eg. large number of identical machines), you'll occasionally run into a batch of machines with particularly dodgy power supplies, hard drives, etc..... More interestingly, if you've got a large sample of "identical" machines that were ordered in separate batches, you'll also likely find that the patterns of failure differ somewhat between the two batches.

The only exception to this is that server/enterprise-grade drives tend to be more reliable then their counsumer-grade counterparts. This is why they cost (a lot) more.

I like that "IBM Deathstars"... I had some of those early ones with a lot of faults--especially getting quite hot enough to melt plastic surroundings when they get older than a year!! Hitachi's I've not had much issue with but the branded IBM's from Hitachi were a problem. Toshiba and Seagates that I've had were quite stellar. No problems at all with them.

I've noticed that of all my machines, the one I built myself has the longest MTBF as far as hard drives go. I'm pretty sure it's because the drive cage has a dedicated fan, keeping electromechanical devices cool greatly increases their lifespan.

Sorry for your experiences, but they don't match mine very well. I've had a long list of WD drives for years, and only recently retired two 250GB drives that had basically continual use over the last four years or so. I gave them to a friend, that is still using them without issue. I have not had a single WD drive fail on me.When I replaced those drives, I did so with WD's new lower power GP drives, and have had no problem with them at all. Super quiet and seem (without actual benchmarks to back this up) fa

I've been buying +300 WD's for over 10 years now; had 2 disks DOA and 4 disks which died later on. Most of the older disks I got stored in a container as extra backup.One of these disks dying is even my own fault by tilting it while writing.Also, I've been hearing stories at my suppliers; disks made around JUNE-OCTOBER are mostly the ones with the most problems. I wouldn't know it's a general believe although I'm for sure checking my labels before assigning a disk to a server as precaution to myself.

So...this beats the data throughput of any of the 7200 RPM drives by about 50%, and outperforms them in real world benchmarks by about the same, and it does it while consuming LESS power than the WD Green Power drives. It also for the first time comes within about 10% of the speed of a 10k SCSI disk for server-tasks, while using far, far less power. This sounds like a great low end server drive to me, and it's clearly the best single user drive by a large margin. Check out the storagereview.com review, since they actually know what they're doing.

The 300GB Seagate Cheetah 15K.5 is $675.00 at Dell (source: Google [google.com], while the Raptor is (supposedly) about $300.

That's 2.25 times the cost per megabyte.

According to this performance database [storagereview.com] (choose IOMeter 8 I/O. I can't link to it directly, it doesn't seem to support that), the Seagate drive does 293 IOPS vs. the Raptor 3000's 228, so it's only 28% faster (on an 8-deep workload, which is a fairly common one, maybe a little deep).

Cost-per-IOPS wise, the Raptor blows the 15K SCSI drive away. Of course, the

I beg to differ. After waiting for rev2 of these drives, I'm going to use 4 of them in RAID10 for my database server.

I've currently got 4x 74gb drives, and I've been waiting for the next gen Raptor drives for a while now. I'm glad they are here, and I'm glad they are finally at a more usable size for modern applications.

You obviously haven't used one. The TRex drive requires a separate room [data-mountain.co.uk] just for the storage. At least the Raptor fits in a normal case (and, if you have a crowbar to remove the damn black metal thing, in a laptop!

Well... the drives have a heatsink on them that bumb them up to 3.25" size. You can take them out, but it will raise the temp on each drive 4-5 degrees C. Plus add the heat from packing them so close together, and I'm not sure that's such a good idea.

You could also get three 500GB drives, giving you a terabyte of RAID5 storage. Or just JBOD for the same 1.5TB, which you're still better off doing than RAID0 unless you absolutely need the extra speed (meaning HD video capture, and almost nothing else). Of course 750GB drives are starting at $120 these days, so you can head to 2.25TB for $360. Blah blah blah.The only really nice thing about having that kind of speed in a single self-contained drive is not having to futz with RAID support at an OS level,

I've had 3 drives fail on me in ten years. Two were maxtor's one was a WD. The Maxtor's failed within 3 months, the WD was DOA, even so they were my favorite companies for price. I'm sure if I had gone with seagate or any of the others I would have had similar experiences.

If you opperate under the following rules your life will be much easier.

Last time I lost a hard drive due to a controller (only 60 days after purchase) I got the warranty replacement, swapped the controller, imaged the old drive, swapped the controllers back (so all the serial numbers would match), restored the image to the new drive, and returned the old.

Yeah, cause plugging in the power cable and then connecting the SATA cable to the motherboard is just such a hard task. I'm surprised anyone is able to muster the enormous amount of skill that's required by such a task.

Yea but on a mac pro, the drives are out of the way and the rack is standard. You install some drive racks in a 5.25 bay on a PC tower, and you just lost a bunch of internal space because there is still a drive tower inside, empty.

Yea but on a mac pro, the drives are out of the way and the rack is standard.

Yeah it's standard but you're paying a hefty premium I'm not. I can buy 5 of those racks for my case and I'm still saving quite a ton of money over your Mac Pro which can be put into use to buy other things.

You install some drive racks in a 5.25 bay on a PC tower, and you just lost a bunch of internal space because there is still a drive tower inside, empty.

Maybe if you buy a really cheap and cramped PC tower. On mine I don't lose much of any space. Besides if I did need more space the internal drive tower is detachable in my case by simply unscrewing the thumb screws. So in the end you've gained nothing over what I can do in my case and you've paid p

There's no use even making the comparison. You buy what you want because it makes sense for you. Other people buy Mac Pros (or Dells, HPs, or whatever) because they want the warranty, tech support, dealer network, etc. Apple just doesn't see folks like you as part of its market.

1. for the drive, it's a fairly nice case design to work in. some of the cheap POS cases i've worked with make installing a new drive a pain, literally in many cases (sharp edges), though i've also seen nicer cases to work in.

2. i dunno what's he on about with the memory either, unless he's thinking of the cases with overly tight tolerances, resulting in the side panel being difficult to remove, but i keep a large flathead screwdriver in my toolkit for that very reason and it hasn't failed me yet.

Mmm, to some extent, I'm sad to say you are. 2.5" drives are mostly used for speed; last I looked at some arrays the 2.5" version had the same size and cost the same as the 3.5" version. The 3.5" version with 12 750GB SATA disks had 3 times the storage that the 25 disk 2.5" version did. So space efficient it is not.

In fact, if disk vendors want to survive I'd suggest they go the other way and move back to slower 5 1/4" instead. Flash is going to wipe the floor with disk speed anyway, but by

OK, silly nitpick I have to raise every time we talk about traditional versus metric measures: the U.S. has never used Imperial units. That system was invented in the 1820s, when the U.S. had long since ceased to be part of "The Empire". The U.S. uses something called "Customary Units" which is a collection of English units that were common at the time the U.S. declared independence. Most of the common unit names are the same, and some of the definitions are the same (or at least equivalent), but the system

Seek time is a mechanical thing, the heads can only move so fast. If you want faster seek times and want to spend some money, look into solid state drives. Though granted, all the ones I've seen run at 0 RPM.